The Battle of Dinkytown

Another day of “dangerous cold,” according to the Good Neighbor’s page. Not that they use the phrase; why would they? It only has half a century of built-up good will, and what people really want is a generic page forced on them by the network so it looks like every other page in the country.

ARCHITECTURE This story on a proposed development in Dinkytown deserves a column, so I’ll hold my fire here. But let’s just say we would not lose a building of any particular architectural interest.

This piece talks about the police clash in Dtown in 1970, when developers wanted to build a Red Barn. There was an occupation. There were slogans and signs and a People’s Park. Eventually everything was demolished, but the Red Barn was never built. The People’s Park went untended, and turned to weeds, because people lost interest and summer break meant a lot of people went home. The placard in the picture indicated people wanted a boycott of the Red Barn on Oak Street. It looked like this:

n the late 1960s, Servomation bought the company followed by Motel 6 in the late 1970s. The new owners ceased advertising for the chain and the franchise leases were allowed to expire with the last of the leases expiring around 1986.

So they bought it to let it die? Odd.

An ad from the era, with NOT A MUPPET NO NOT AT ALL:

NOT NEWS But that never stopped the press of Great Britain. “Tipsy Mum” gets wedged in kid’s chair, calls cops, friend takes pictures on cell phone, and it all ends up in the Scottish Sun because no one has any shame whatsoever and acts like a high-school idiot with a bottle of Boone's Farm well into her aduthood. Bonus: photos of Tipsy Mum having a smoke break between attempts to escape the chair.

Astronomers have discovered the largest known structure in the universe - a group of quasars so large it would take 4 billion years to cross it while traveling at speed of light. The immense scale also challenges Albert Einstein's Cosmological Principle, the assumption that the universe looks the same from every point of view, researchers said.

Never bought that assumption. Never understood it, which might be the problem. Anyway: you’re wondering how these Large Quasar Groups can be bigger than galactic superclusters. I was wondering the exact same thing. Quasars are stars, right? And galaxies are made up of billions of stars, and galactic clusters are made up of galaxies, and superclusters are made up of clusters of galaxies which each contain billions of stars, so . . . unless those quasars are huge, how could they possibly exceed the size of the Sloan Great Wall, which is officially the Biggest Thing?

It’s not the biggest thing anymore. Quasars are galactic nuclei, not stars. The very name is a clue: quasi-stellar. I grew up thinking they were stars, but now the science says they’re galactic centers covering the rich delicious nougat of the supermassive black hole, aka, Sauron. So the newly discovered thing - which has 73 quasars - can indeed be the Biggest Thing Ever. It looks like this.

You’ll have to take their word for it.

Speaking of growing up with an incomplete knowledge of quasars:

Yes, plug-in modules! The problem with TV ads: the New Improved Picture you’re showing people is only as good as the picture they get.

That's it; stay warm out there, which goes without saying. But we have to say it so we can feel like we're doing a Public Service. Or being a Good Neighbor.